The Return (3 page)

One winter night Pavlov called me at home.
He sounded furious.
He
ordered me to come and see him immediately.
I’d heard through the grapevine that
some of his business operations weren’t going so well.
I tried to suggest that
maybe it could wait, given the time and the temperature outside, but Misha
wasn’t in a waiting mood: Either you get here in half an hour, he said, or
tomorrow morning I cut your balls off.
I got dressed as fast as I could and
before going out I put a knife in my pocket, a knife I’d bought when I was a
medical student.
The streets of Moscow, at four in the morning, are not exactly
safe, as I guess you know.
The trip was like the continuation of the nightmare
I’d been having when I was woken by Pavlov’s call.
The streets were covered with
snow, the temperature must have been about five or ten degrees and for quite a
while I didn’t see another human being.
At first I was walking ten yards and
then trotting the next ten to warm myself up.
After fifteen minutes, my body
resigned itself to plodding on, step by step, clenched against the cold.
Twice I
saw patrol cars coming, and hid.
Twice I saw taxis, but neither of them stopped
for me.
Apart from that, I came across drunks, who ignored me, and shadows,
which, as I passed, disappeared into the enormous entrances along Medveditsa
Avenue.
The apartment where I was to meet Pavlov was in Nemetskaya Street;
normally, on foot, it would have taken thirty or thirty-five minutes to get
there, but that hellish night it took almost an hour and when I arrived four
toes on my left foot were frozen.

Pavlov was waiting for me by the fireplace, reading and drinking
cognac.
Before I could say anything he smashed his fist into my nose.
I hardly
felt the blow but I let myself fall anyway.
Don’t stain my carpet, I heard him
say.
He proceeded to kick me about five times in the ribs, but since he was
wearing slippers, that didn’t hurt too much either.
Then he took a seat, picked
up his book and his glass and seemed to calm down.
I got up, went to the
bathroom to wash away the blood that was running from my nose, and then returned
to the living room.
What are you reading?
I asked him.
Bulgakov, said Pavlov.
You know his work, don’t you?
Ah, Bulgakov, I said as my stomach tied itself in
a knot.
You mention Natalia, I thought, and I’ll kill you.
I slipped my hand
into my coat pocket, feeling for the little knife.
I like sincere people, said
Pavlov, honorable people, who aren’t underhanded; when I place my trust in
someone, I want to be able to trust that person implicitly.
My foot is frozen, I
said, you should drop me at the hospital.
Pavlov didn’t listen, so I decided to
stop complaining, anyway it wasn’t that bad, I could already move my toes.
For a
while both of us were silent: Pavlov looked at the book by Bulgakov (
The
Fateful Eggs
, I think it was), while I watched the flames in the
fireplace.
Natalia told me you’ve been seeing her, said Pavlov.
I didn’t say
anything but I nodded.
Are you sleeping with that whore?
No, I lied.
Another
silence.
Suddenly I was convinced that Pavlov had murdered Natalia and was going
to murder me the same night.
Without weighing up the consequences I threw myself
at him and slashed his throat.
I spent the next half hour covering my tracks.
Then I went home and got drunk.

A week later the police arrested me and took me to the Ilininkov
police station where I was questioned for an hour.
A pure formality.
Pavlov’s
replacement was called Igor Borisovich Protopopov, also known as the Sardine.
He
wasn’t interested in athletes, but he kept me on as a bettor and match-fixer.
I
served him for six months before leaving Russia.
What about Natalia, you must be
wondering.
I saw her the day after killing Pavlov, very early, at the sports
center where she trained.
She didn’t like the look of me.
She said I looked like
I was dead.
I detected a note of scorn in her voice, but also a note of
familiarity, even affection.
I laughed and said I’d drunk a lot the night
before, that was all.
Then I took myself to the hospital where Jimmy Fodeba
worked to get my frozen toes checked out.
It wasn’t really a serious problem,
but by greasing a few palms we got them to keep me there for three days; then
Jimmy fiddled the admission forms so it turned out that when Pavlov was killed,
I had been flat on my back, warmly tucked up and happy as could be.

Like I told you, six months later I left Russia.
Natalia came with me.
First we lived in Paris and we even talked about getting married.
It was the
happiest time in my life.
So happy that when I think back to it now, it makes me
feel ashamed.
Then we spent a while in Frankfurt and in Stuttgart, where Natalia
had friends and hoped to find a good job.
The friends weren’t so friendly in the
end, and poor Natalia couldn’t find steady employment, though she even tried
working as a cook in a Russian restaurant.
But she was no good at cooking.
We
hardly ever talked about Pavlov’s death.
Unlike the police, Natalia thought his
own men had done away with him, specifically the Sardine, but I said it must
have been a rival gang.
Funnily enough, she remembered Pavlov as a gentleman and
always spoke warmly of his generosity.
I let her go on and laughed to myself.
Once I asked her if she was related to General Chuikov, the man who defended
Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd.
The things you come up with, Roger, she
said, of course not.
When we’d been living together for a year she left me for a
German, by the name of Kurt something or other.
She told me she was in love and
then she cried, because she felt sorry for me or just because she was happy, I
don’t know.
Come on, that’s enough,
mala mujer
, I said to her.
She
started laughing like she always did when I spoke my language.
I started
laughing too.
We shared a bottle of vodka and said good-bye.
After that, when I
realized there was nothing to keep me in that German city, I came to Barcelona.
I’m working as a gymnastics instructor in a private school.
Things aren’t going
too badly; I sleep with whores and there are two bars where I hang out and have
a circle, as they say here.
But sometimes, especially at night, I miss Russia, I
miss Moscow.
It’s pretty good here but it’s not the same, though if you asked
me, I wouldn’t be able to say exactly what it is I miss.
The joy of just being
alive?
I don’t know.
One of these days I’m going to get on a plane and go back
to Chile.

Another Russian Tale

for Anselmo Sanjuán

Once, after a conversation with a friend about the mercurial nature of
art, Amalfitano told a story he’d heard in Barcelona.
The story was about a
sorche
, a rookie, in the Spanish Blue Division, which fought in the
Second World War, on the Russian Front, with the German Northern Army Group to
be precise, in the vicinity of Novgorod.

The rookie was a little guy from Seville, blue-eyed and thin as a
rake, and more or less by accident (he was no Dionisio Ridruejo, not even a
Tomás Salvador; when he had to give the Roman salute, he did, but he wasn’t
really a fascist or a Falangist at heart) he ended up in Russia.
And there, for
some reason, someone started calling him
sorche
for short: Over here,
sorche
, or:
Sorche
, do this,
Sorche
, do that, so
the word lodged itself in the guy’s head, but in the dark part of his head, and
in that capacious and desolate place, with passing time and the daily panicking,
it was somehow transformed into
chantre
, cantor.
How this happened I
don’t know, let’s just say that some connection dormant since childhood was
reactivated, some pleasant memory that had been waiting for its chance to
return.

So the Andalusian came to think of himself as being a cantor and
having a cantor’s duties, although he had no conscious idea of what the word
meant, and couldn’t have said that it referred to the leader of a church or
cathedral choir.
And yet, and this is the remarkable thing, by thinking of
himself as a cantor, he somehow turned himself into one.
During the terrible
winter of ’41, he took charge of the choir that sang carols while the Russians
were hammering the 250th Regiment.
He remembered those days as full of noise
(muffled, constant noises) and an underground, slightly unfocused joy.
They
sang, but it was as if the voices were lagging behind or even anticipating the
movements of the singers’ lips, throats and eyes, which in their own brief but
peculiar journeys often slipped into a kind of silent crevice.

The Andalusian carried out his other duties with courage and
resignation, although over time, he did become embittered.

He soon paid his dues in blood.
One afternoon he was wounded, more or
less accidentally, and spent two weeks in the military hospital in Riga, under
the care of robust, smiling German women, nursing for the Reich, who couldn’t
believe the color of his eyes, and some extremely ugly volunteer nurses from
Spain, probably sisters or sisters-in-law or distant cousins of José
Antonio.

When he was discharged, a confusion occurred that was to have grave
consequences for the Andalusian: instead of giving him a ticket to the right
destination, they shunted him off to the barracks of an SS battalion two hundred
miles from his regiment.
There, among Germans, Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians,
Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, all much taller and stronger than him, he tried to
explain the confusion in his rudimentary German, but the SS officers brushed him
off, and while it was being sorted out, they gave him a broom and made him sweep
the barracks, then a bucket and a rag to clean the floor of the enormous
rectangular wooden building in which they held, interrogated and tortured
prisoners of all sorts.

Not entirely resigned to his lot, but performing his new tasks
conscientiously, the Andalusian watched the time go by in his new barracks,
where he ate much better than before and was not exposed to any new dangers,
since the SS battalion had been stationed well behind the lines, to combat what
they called “outlaws.”
Then, in the dark part of his head, the word
sorche
became legible again.
I’m a
sorche
, he said, a
rookie, and I should accept my fate.
Little by little, the word
chantre
disappeared, although some afternoons, under a limitless sky that filled him
with nostalgia for Seville, it resonated still, somewhere, lost in the beyond.
Once he heard some German soldiers singing, and he remembered the word; another
time there was a boy singing behind a thicket, and again he remembered it, more
clearly this time, but when he went around to the other side of the bushes, the
boy was gone.

One fine day, what was bound to happen happened.
The barracks of the
SS battalion came under attack and were captured, some say by a Russian cavalry
regiment, though others claim it was a group of partisans.
The fighting was
brief and the Germans were at a disadvantage from the start.
After an hour the
Russians found the Andalusian hidden in the rectangular building, wearing the
uniform of an SS auxiliary and surrounded by evidence of the atrocities
committed there not so long ago.
Caught red-handed, so to speak.
They attached
him to one of the chairs that the SS used for interrogations, with straps on the
legs and the armrests, and to every question from the Russians he replied in
Spanish that he didn’t understand and was just a dogsbody there.
He also tried
to say it in German, but he barely knew four words of that language and his
interrogators knew none at all.
After a quick session of slapping and kicking,
they went to get a guy who could speak German and was questioning prisoners in
another of the rectangular building’s cells.
Before they came back, the
Andalusian heard shots, and knew they were killing some of the SS, which put an
end to any hopes he might have had of getting out of there unharmed.
And yet,
when the shooting stopped, he clung to life again with every fiber of his being.
The Russian who knew German asked him what he was doing there, what his job was
and his rank.
The Andalusian tried to explain, in German, but it was no use.
Then the Russians opened his mouth, and with a pair of pincers, which the
Germans had used on other body parts, they started pulling and squeezing his
tongue.
The pain made his eyes water, and he said, or rather shouted, the word
coño
, cunt.
The pincers in his mouth distorted the expletive which
came out, in his howling voice, as
Kunst
.

The Russian who knew German looked at him in puzzlement.
The
Andalusian was yelling
Kunst, Kunst
and crying with pain.
In German,
the word
Kunst
means art, and that was what the bilingual soldier was
hearing, and he said, This son of a bitch must be an artist or something.
The
guys who were torturing the Andalusian removed the pincers along with a little
piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the revelation.
The word
art
.
Art, which soothes the savage beast.
And so, like soothed
beasts, the Russians took a breather and waited for some kind of signal while
the rookie bled from the mouth and swallowed his blood liberally mixed with
saliva, and choked.
The word
coño
transformed into the word
Kunst
, had saved his life.
When he came out of the rectangular
building, it was dusk, but the light stabbed at his eyes like midday sun.

They took him away along with the few remaining prisoners, and before
long he was able to tell his story to a Russian who knew some Spanish, and he
ended up in a prison camp in Siberia while his accidental partners in iniquity
were executed.
He was in Siberia until well into the fifties.
In 1957 he settled
in Barcelona.
Sometimes he’d open his mouth and cheerfully tell his tales of
war.
Sometimes he’d open his mouth and show whoever wanted a look the place
where a chunk was missing from his tongue.
You could hardly see it.
The
Andalusian explained that over the years it had grown back.
Amalfitano didn’t
know him personally.
But when he heard the story, the guy was still living in a
janitor’s apartment in Barcelona.